Ignatius - Worth Dying

Ignatius of Antioch | Truly Nailed for Us in the Flesh He named himself God-bearer. Then he proved it. Ignatius of Antioch was bishop of the church where Christians were first called Christians, a disciple of the Apostle John, and a man who had pastored one congregation for forty years when Roman soldiers chained him and marched him toward the Colosseum. He had every reason to use the trip to feel sorry for himself. Instead he wrote seven letters. In them he called Jesus God eleven times, dismantled the Gnostics who were trying to hand the church a Jesus who never really bled, and told anyone thinking about rescuing him to please stay out of it. He wanted this. His guards, the ten soldiers assigned to escort him to his execution, converted on the road. The man being marched to his death was, apparently, more convincing than the empire paying his killers. This sermon is the second entry in the family album and it picks up where Polycarp left off. It asks the question Ignatius forced his generation to answer: which Jesus do you actually have? The clean, spiritual, above-the-mess version who never really suffered? Or the one who was truly nailed for us in the flesh? It argues that only one of those Jesuses can meet you at 3am when everything falls apart, and that a faith built on the real one is the only thing the empire's threats cannot touch. God-bearer. Letter-writer. Unafraid. Scripture: Philippians 1:21 | Colossians 1:19-20 | 1 John 4:18